Sunday, July 1, 2012

Ingalls Creek Trail - Butterflies and Balsamroot

Papilio eurymedon - Pale Swallowtail on Lilium columbianum - Columbia Lily on the Ingalls Creek TrailWe started out on July 1st with our first Northwest hike of the year. We escaped the gray of Seattle (the 4th of July was still several days away and everyone knows summer starts on the 4th in the Northwest) and headed east over the mountains to get us some sunshine. The hike was up Ingalls Creek in the Central Cascades. From the trailhead you hike more or less due west following the creek, sometimes close to it, and sometimes high above it, but always within earshot. We hiked about 6.1 miles in and then turned around. With lots of stops for picture taking and two stops to eat, we took 7.5 hours to cover about 12.3 miles in total. We left the trailhead at 11:45am and returned at 7:15pm.

The trail takes you to the base of the Enchantments to the north. About 6 miles in, we saw a waterfall coming down from the Enchantments. There is a nice mix of covered walking (out of the sun) and exposed-to-the-sun walking. It seems like the prime time for wildflowers on this trail might have been a few weeks ago, yet, there was still lots to see. Speaking of seeing: on the trail we encountered very few bugs and didn’t see any snakes. At least one group of hikers we saw said they heard and then saw a rattlesnake.

We titled this post “Butterflies and Balsamroot” because we were first, wowed by the number of butterflies we saw and, second, we had never seen arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) before. In terms of butterflies, we hopelessly tried to follow some to take a photos, but suddenly we would be standing next to a Columbia Lily (Lilium columbianum) and suddenly a butterfly would land on the lily and spend minutes feeding, inches from our face. Arrowleaf balsamroot really started to show up a couple of miles into the hike. Ironically, we didn’t see any butterflies feeding on balsamroot. The butterflies we encountered included Lorquin's Admiral (Limenitis lorquini), Lilac-Bordered Copper (Lycaena nivalis), Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa), Chryxus Arctic (Oeneis chryxus), Pale Swallowtail (Papilio eurymedon), Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus), and Northern Blue (Plebejus idas). Also, we were able to identify one moth, a White-striped Black (Trichodezia albovittata). Resources we used to help identify butterflies and moths include:

Butterflies of America - a comprehensive but harder to use site; your best bet is to guess the family or genus and then open the page and scroll down through the images to find a match. For example, we guessed on the Mourning Cloak’s family Nymphalidae (Brushfoots) and then opened the very large family page and scanned the images.